The Young Composers

"I was sitting at home one day." said plump, dimple-cheeked Susan Freiberg, "and all at once I had an idea for a tune.

I said to myself, 'Why. that sounds like a shrimp.'" Twelve-year-old Susan's tune promptly became Minuet of the Shrimp, one of 300 tunes, poems, dances submitted by 60 sixth-grade pupils of Cincinnati's suburban North Avondale Public School for inclusion in a group cantata, a sweeping experiment at musical education. Last week they had the thrill of performing their work with a professional symphony orchestra. The project began a year ago, when the Cincinnati Symphony played at one of its popular children's concerts a cantata called Moon Rocket, a musical trip to the moon composed by Dorothy Fee, a New Jersey kindergarten music teacher. The young audience was enthralled. One of them, Tom Osher, then a fifth-grader, suggested to his music teacher. Charlotte Perso, that he and his classmates might be able to do a similar work for performance by the Cincinnati Symphony. The idea appealed to Conductor Thor Johnson, so two classes decided to follow the trip to the moon with their own trip to the sea.

The young composers, poets and choreographers worked hard during their weekly 100 minutes of music class and even harder at their homes--each other's and their teacher's--where they danced, sang and played their compositions on the piano.

For the performance last week an inflated nine-foot lobster and a cardboard octopus of grand design decorated the stage of Cincinnati's Music Hall as schoolchildren and proud parents filed in to hear the Cincinnati Symphony do Sea Secrets, a Cantata for Speakers, Chorus and Orchestra.

Edited by Conductor Johnson and Music Teacher Perso. Secrets was scaled down to a trim 23 minutes, highlighted by The Ballad of Mort, the Whale, Lobster Dante, Ballet of the Octopus and Sea Horse Gallop, a tap dance in 6/8 time, as well as Susan Freiberg's Minuet of the Shrimp. The local critics disdained to cover the premiere, but Conductor Johnson thought Sea Secrets good enough to be shown to a music publisher. Said he: "It is beautiful in its whimsicality."

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